Joey’s Crappy Day

I decided to throw some money into my Roth IRA the other day, just for old times’ sake. I bought 95 shares of DayStar Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: DSTI). The transaction went through this morning and the stock is up a little already. Not too bad I guess.

On the other hand, the rest of my portfolio is down over 50% from it’s original value. This includes my 3 shares of XM Radio I bought a few years ago for about $80. One merger later those 3 shares are now 13.8 shares of Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) worth a total of $1.60 (not each, TOTAL), a 96% drop in price.

This is why no one is getting anything for Christmas this year.

As our economy collapses all around us, many people are wondering what excuses they can use to get out of buying gifts. Here are a few excuses for not giving gifts that will satisfy all but the greediest of friends and relatives.

1. Convert to Islam - As far as I know, Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas. And since everyone is fairly ignorant of this religion anyway, you can just tell people you can’t give or receive gifts or you’ll go to hell.

2. Found a fundamentalist Christian sect - One of your rules can be that you don’t celebrate Christmas because it is based on pagan holidays.

3. Convert to paganism - Refuse to celebrate Christmas because it has “highjacked” your holidays.

4. De-convert to atheism - Atheists don’t believe in a god and therefore are not required to celebrate the birth of the son of one.

5. Become a homosexual - This should serve to get you disowned by most of your family and friends. If not, tell them you are saving all your money for a sex change.

6. Become a pariah - Steal the baby Jesus from a local nativity. Mug a nun. Push an old lady into a mud puddle. Do anything that will make people not want to associate with you for at least 2 months.

7. Spend your gift money on other things - I recommend splitting it between hookers and cocaine, but if you want more bang for your buck you can spend it all on heroine and bum a used needle off a drifter at the bus station while trying to explain how you don’t have 50 cents for him to buy a candy bar from the vending machine.

8. Pretend to have amnesia - Suddenly come out of it on December 26.

9. Shame them - Tell everyone you spent all your holiday gift money buying coats for people at the homeless shelter, meals for shut-ins, medicine for cancer patients, gruel for orphans… whatever works.

10. Take a holiday vacation - You can’t give gifts if you aren’t around.

11. Go to prison - Just don’t forget to give your cellmate a gift or things could get rough for you in the shower.

And finally…

12. Shame them 2 - Really give all your holiday gift money to orphans, hobos, drifters, cancer patients, or some other person who really needs it for things other than iPods and Isotoners.

If you ever wanted to know why the world wide web is called a web, check out this scenario. I got an email from an anonymous person yesterday telling me that they had found my website through “the MSN lottery story.” She said she really enjoyed one of the articles on my site (link probably not safe for work).

I appreciated the feedback and wrote her back asking what this MSN lottery story thing was. It turns out that there is a money blog at MSN and that blogger wrote about another blog that I regularly read and occasionally comment on called All Financial Matters. JLP at AFM had written a post about winning the lottery and asked his readers what they would do. I posted a comment stating what I’d do. In the comment was a link to my website.

So when Karen at MSN wrote about the post she mentioned my comment and linked to me. That means that I am now blogging about a blog post that was blogging about a blog post. What a twisted web we weave. Now I just need someone else to blog about this post and then someone to blog about that post ad infinitum.

Just an FYI. My tax return deposited today into my checking account by direct deposit. So that makes it about 10 business days from the time I hit submit until the funds were in the account. Looks like TaxACT works! Oh, and don’t be asking me for any loans. Unfortnately, the money is already spent.

If you haven’t heard, you can file your taxes free of charge at http://taxact.com. I did it and I wasn’t charged a penny, not even for e-filing. My tax forms are fairly simple and I found the site to be easy to use. I’m not sure how it would work for more complicated forms, but should probably be just as easy. The interface was similar to Turbotax online only much cheaper and/or free. They do have a “Deluxe” version that is $9.95, but I did not need it to complete my return. If you’re curious, give it a try. There’s no need to enter a credit card number but you will have to enter your personal information like your date of birth and social security number.

I have recently been struggling with my finances. The hard part is figuring out where everything is going. I was basically paying for everything with my debit card and not keeping track of how much I was spending. It turns out I was spending more that I was making. Because I don’t have a credit card, I was drawing on my savings to make up any differences in what was going out. When the savings ran out, I began to get overdrawn on my checking account. It was time to get things back under control.

Several years ago I discovered a guy named Dave Ramsey on the radio. Dave teaches people how to get out of debt and start saving money. His methods sometimes run counter to the conventional wisdom, but they are simple and easy to follow. He’s not one of those get-rich-quick con-artists, he’s just a regular guy who preaches common sense in finance. using his methods I paid off about $8,000 in credit card debt and was debt free for about 3 years.

In March of 2004 I decided that it would be nice to buy a new car because my old car was kinda getting shabby. Of course I hadn’t saved one penny towards buying a new car, so I financed it and suddenly I was back in debt. This is where is all started going wrong. By December of 2006 the savings was gone and my checking account was overdrawn.

In early January I decided that my problems could be linked to the fact that I had strayed from the path that had gotten me out of debt in the first place. Not only had a I strayed from the path, I had never really been on the path at all. I had followed along in the ditch and that got me out of debt, but it didn’t keep me out of debt. To get and stay out of debt, I realized I’d have to walk back to the road, crawl up out of the ditch, and walk down the center-line.

My solution was to go to my trusty Financial Peace Planner and get on a plan. That meant budgeting and using an envelope system, two things I had not done before. Both of them seemed too cumbersome and complicated. I’ve found that not to be true at all.

Being a complete and utter nerd, I decided that I would create a spreadsheet (download here) to help me with my budget. This was a good idea because not only did it help me to create an easy to work budget, it also satisfied my computer geekiness. Once I had my budget I discovered that using the envelope system wasn’t as cumbersome as I had thought. With everything now planned out in the budget, it was easy to withdraw the correct amount of funds on payday and then put the funds in my wallet whenever I planned to use them.

I also discovered some great web sites that I have added to my Links page (page not active at this time - Ed.). Check them out and contact me if you have any questions.

Lots of stuff going on since my last post. First, we had a line of storms move through last night. As per usual, the strong stuff missed Hermitage, but somehow my apartment complex managed to have a 9 hour power outage. I read a lot and enjoyed the peacefulness. Then I tried to sleep without much success. I just laid on my couch sweating and wondering when the power would come back on. At about 5am I decided I’d had enough and I got up and took a shower. While in the bathroom I decided that maybe I should start having a “no power” day every week or two. It would be a day where I turned off the TV, computer, radio, etc. It sounds good now, but I’ll probably never get around to doing it.

Second, most of my bills are still not paid, and there’s a possibility that I am a wanted man in Wyoming because I still haven’t paid my ticket and it’s past the court date. But not to worry, I will pay my bills today.

Third… I never did hear from Michael Moore. I suppose he’s too busy gloating and posing for pictures in Time magazine to make time for the little people like yours truly.

Finally, I used the new hard drive I bought as an excuse to buy a new motherboard, processor, and RAM. I got an Athlon 64 2800+ processor, and Abit KV8 mainboard, and two sticks of 512MB PC3200 DIMMS. One of my friends told me that I’ll be the first person he knows with a 64bit processor. Too bad I don’t have any 64bit software.

I have a bunch of bills due about right now. I have the money to pay them, but for some reason I’m just not doing it. I’m hoping that if I write about it I will get motivated to do something. I feel like I need another vacation.